Monday, June 23, 2014

Multiple Challenges to DEA Control Over Medical Marijua

The Drug Policy Alliance’s new report, The DEA: Four Decades of Impeding and Rejecting Science,
is released at a pivotal time, as federal legislators consider limiting
financial support of the DEA. On May 29, the U.S. House of
Representatives approved a bipartisan appropriations measure to withhold
funding from the DEA’s raids of state-legalized medical marijuana
facilities. The Senate followed suit last week with the proposal of a
similar funding amendment prohibiting the DEA from pursuing providers
and patients of medical marijuana and extracted cannabididol oil. Also
last week, New York became the 23rd state to legalize medical marijuana.

The Case Against the DEA
The
Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) advocates for drug law reform, including
legalization, sensible regulation, and harm reduction. The Alliance
challenges the DEA’s willful disregard of scientific evidence that has
kept marijuana in the federal list of most-highly controlled substances.
Their report reviews the basis of the DEA’s authority and details five
cases: three unsuccessful petitions to reschedule marijuana, a
researcher’s application to create a licensed research-grade marijuana
production facility, and – as a point of comparison – the speedy process
through which MDMA (Ecstasy) was classified as Schedule I.

The
Controlled Substances Act (CSA) of 1970 granted the U.S. Attorney
General with responsibility over classification, scheduling, and
enforcement of drugs; Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in
1973 as the designated agency for handling these matters. Drugs are classified into Schedule I – Schedule V based on medical and scientific evidence. The
distinction of interest between Schedule I and Schedule II-V is that
Schedule I drugs have “no currently accepted medical use,” a fact that
was the focus of the 1995 and 2002 petitions to reschedule marijuana. In its 2011 response, the DEA brazenly claimed the following:

According
to established case law, marijuana has no ‘currently accepted medical
use’ because the drug’s chemistry is not known and reproducible, there
are no adequate safety studies, there are no adequate and
well-controlled studies proving efficacy; the drug is not accepted by
qualified experts, and the scientific evidence is not widely available.

The
DEA’s position seems patently ridiculous, given just a few touchstones
from the past decade. First, the medical use of marijuana has been
legal in the state of California since 1996, supported by the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 recommendation that marijuana be allowed for some patients. Second, the 2009 AMA Policy: Medical Marijuana, calls for a review of marijuana’s Schedule I status to facilitate further medical studies of marijuana.

In
contrast to the lethargic pace at which the DEA responds to
rescheduling petitions (6-22 years), the report documents the DEA’s
speedy action to schedule drugs new to the market, such as MDMA (two
years), synthetic cannabinoids such as Spice, K2 (less than one year),
and synthetic stimulants like mephedrone and MPDV (less than two years),
with control of the latter two substances dictated by the Synthetic
Drug Control Act of 2011.

DEA’s Control over Research
The
report reveals a systematic effort to undermine and obstruct scientific
research. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) is the only legal
producer of marijuana for research. Studies of marijuana require review
by the FDA, NIDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
A 1999 HHS directive stipulates that NIDA should not provide research
marijuana to studies with the goal of developing an FDA-approved
medicine. This has resulted in what the report labels as a catch-22: only
FDA-approved studies may apply to NIDA for marijuana product, yet NIDA
is compelled to reject the majority of those studies. NIDA
has repeatedly delayed delivery or refused to provide approved studies
with product. Finally, the low-quality marijuana produced by NIDA is not
representative of the marijuana currently available to the public: NIDA has only a limited number of low potency strains (7% THC) compared to the market (15-24% THC).

Recommended Action
The
report states that the DEA is “incapable of accurately assessing the
state of medical and scientific knowledge about those drugs and
scheduling them appropriately.” The DPA recommends that the United
States Attorney General designate a different agency as responsible for
classifying drugs and making schedule determinations, perhaps even
commissioning a non-governmental agency, such as the National Academy of
Sciences. NIDA’s current monopoly on research-grade marijuana should be
eliminated, instead contracting to licensed private producers.